The more I learn about music, the more musical I discover speech to be. For instance: Many people say “Hel-lo” in a sing-song tone that is the same musical interval as the standard doorbell chime (a descending major 3rd for music nerds paying attention). I’m guessing this is an unconscious thing, or maybe I’m just obtuse and it’s taken me this much time to deduce. The question I have for you, though, is which came first, the “Hel-lo” interval as a happy greeting or the doorbell chimes being tuned to a descending major 3rd then getting mimicked because it was the last thing you’d heard before answering the door, and then sunk into the collective unconscious.
Speaking of music, I spent about 4 hours on a plane today, and thank science for phones that compute and play music, otherwise I would have died. So I spend the 4 hours listening to some old school trance, mentally tracking the melodic patterns, basslines, drum tracks and fx hits. As far as the melodies go, they’re fairly simple, where this music shines is in it’s exploration of color (the difference in overtones and attack that separate one instrument from another, because they all generate the exact same type of waves – sine… even square and triangle waves are just variations of the sine) The structure of the songs seems to be a sort of unconscious mimicry of classical sonata form, with the orchestrational style of Ravel (take a closer listen to Bolero – you’ll notice that the melody never changes – Ravel lost his ability to hear pitch but not color, so the piece is a 15 minute exploration of the different colors he could imagine). Classical trance has a melody or two, often variations on a single melody, and every 4 or 8 bars something changes, and melodies are repeated quite a bit but the color of the instruments is a constantly changing swirl of sound.
Musically speaking, these tracks put anything generated by the musical-industrial complex to shame. T-Pain and that other robosinger haven’t got much going on if you strip out their awful lyrics. A bunch of hooks that some engineer looped up for them and some incessant droning about how bad-ass he is or how he’s gonna be gettin with some chick (but in the end, really, all music is about gettin ass).
Yootoob’s kinda sucking tonight, or maybe it’s the internets withering away, but I found a recording of one of my more favorite tracks from the old days.
By the by, there’s never been a good video for trance music. Thankfully this is just a still screen. My apologies if the actual video is broken and it’s not just me, it’s too late to test such things after transcontinental flight, other videos work, but this is the only copy on easily available internet right now. The sound quality ain’t much good either, but there’s good quality recordings of Oakenfold @ Rojam out there to be found if anyone’s interested in the whole thing.
True nerds will recognize this, which I actually own the cd for (and don’t recommend to anyone else. seriously.)
I could probably go on for hours, but I’m jet lagged and probably starting to drop sense out of my writing. I’ll leave it at this: the guy who cut that video to that awesomely terrible song by Harajuku won almost every award given out for the video competition at Anime Expo that year. I think they gave someone else a pity award just to prevent a sweep. He did it with totally primitive equipment, too, wrote to him about 9 years ago – this is the only thing that makes the phantom of the opera interesting when you’re older than 14 so I had to ask about his magic.
Oh wait, I was leav
(oh FFS forgot to link the quote)
Tags: claxical, i, major third, music